I’ve spent a big chunk of the last few months writing about replay review. It’s been unavoidable, because the officiating has become the dominant story of the 2019 postseason, and there’s a growing cry for the league to do something. For many, that something is more replay review, for everything from hand passes to majors and match penalties to (most recently) even tripping minors.
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I don’t necessarily agree, at least with some of the more extreme proposals. I’ve laid out my case for why I think replay review for penalties would be a disaster. I’ve outlined the five hard questions the league needs to ask before they go any further down the replay path. I’ve tweeted about it. Lord, so many tweets.
So I’ve made my point. Some would say I’ve beaten it into the ground. But here’s the thing: One of my pet peeves in life is people who complain about everyone else’s ideas without ever saying what they’d do instead, and I’m getting dangerously close to that territory. Anyone can stand on the sidelines and say “this is broken.” At some point, you should be willing to offer up some ideas for how to fix it.
This feels like the right time to do that, since we’re told Gary Bettman will present his plan to the competition committee today. Maybe my ideas are better. Maybe they’re worse. Maybe they’re exactly the same, and Bettman will tweet the Spiderman pointing meme at me and I’ll transform into a corncob.
The point is, I’ve done enough complaining. It’s time to be part of the solution. So here’s my 10-point plan for expanding and also shrinking but mostly fixing replay review. Read it over. Pick it apart. Agree with it, or don’t. Tell me why it is in fact me who has been the idiot all along. Fair’s fair. Here we go.
Step 1: Expanded review for black-and-white calls
We’ll start with the change we can probably get almost everyone to agree on. We’ll expand replay review to include hand passes, like that Timo Meier overtime miss. Today, those can only be reviewed if the puck is batted directly into the net. Now, we’ll be reviewing them anywhere along a play that leads to a goal.
We’ll also add pucks that are directed with a high-stick, which is the same category of play. And while we’re at it, we can include the review of pucks that hit the netting, which we learned this postseason is already on the books but in an extremely limited way. That gets expanded here.
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The review would come from the league war room, which is already responsible for automatically reviewing just about everything goal-related, like kicking motions and pucks crossing the line. It’s a little bit of extra work that will occasionally add a few seconds of extra time before we can face off and get back to playing, but it will be worth it.
That all feels like common sense. Those additional reviews would be rare, but they’d be important, and we should be able to do them in a way that avoids any controversy.
Of course, careful readers will notice that there’s one detail we have to nail down first …
Step 2: Define what “leading to a goal” means
This was one of my tough questions from this post. What does it mean for a play to lead to a goal, and where do you draw the line? Is it based on a certain number of seconds? Distance from the net? The puck staying in the zone? Some touchy-feely “we’ll know it when we see it” sense of intuition?
Not in our new system. For us, a play leads to a goal if the defending team never regains possession. If they touch and control the puck at any point after the missed infraction, then we don’t worry about it. You had your chance to make a play, you can’t blame the miss anymore.
In other words, our message here to the players is straightforward: Keep playing hockey. If there’s a glove pass or the puck hits the netting or whatever else, don’t stop and wave your arms around like a tattling first-grader. Keep playing. If the miss causes a goal, we’ll take care of it with replay. Otherwise, keep doing your job. A missed call earlier in the shift doesn’t give you a magical do-over on everything else that happens afterward.
Admittedly, we’re introducing a sliver of subjectivity here, because possession can be dicey. But we already have a relatively common play where officials need to make this kind of judgment: Delayed penalties. We’ll use the same definition here.
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Note that simply making contact with the puck isn’t possession, so Meier’s hand pass still falls under this expanded review even though the puck deflected off Jay Bouwmeester’s leg. Our expanded rule would also have waved off the Blue Jackets’ goal in Boston, because the Bruins never got the puck back after it hit the netting. But this play from a few years ago where over a minute of game time and multiple possessions go by while Jack Edwards has a meltdown? Get out of here. Keep playing hockey.
Step 3: Review for a few penalties, but only a few
Yes, we’re allowing replay review for penalties. But only certain types, and only for calls that are purely objective.
First things first: Let’s just let the officials use replay for puck-over-glass calls. I hate this stupid rule, but if we’re going to be stuck with it then lets at least make sure they’re calling it right. There are somehow still people out there who claim this rule is great because it’s so black-and-white, even as we can’t ever seem to get it called without needing all four officials to huddle up and triangulate exit angles. Enough. If you’re going to stand around arguing about whether the puck was deflected or where the shot came from or whether it went over the glass here or (moves finger a fraction of an inch) there, then just grab an iPad and watch a replay. This might be the only known case where more review would actually save us some time.
We’ll also allow officials to check high-sticking penalties if there’s a question as to whether the opponent’s stick made contact. Sometimes it looks that way, but it turns out to be a teammate’s stick or the puck. If the refs want to double-check, they can.
Finally, we’re not including head hits as a reviewable play right now, because the current rule is complicated and subjective. But if and when the NHL just goes with a blanket “all hits to the head are illegal” rule, those will be reviewable too.
That’s it. When it comes to penalties, that’s the whole list.
Step 4: Absolutely no new reviews for anything subjective
But what about everything else? What about all those missed hooks or holds, or the majors that should have been minors, or the minors that should have been majors, or the stuff that might have been a dive, or whatever subjective call happened to your favorite team last night that you’re mad about?
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Not reviewable. None of them.
Almost every penalty call is subjective. The rules are written that way. Hockey is a fast game, and the best people to decide on penalty calls are the ones who are down there on the ice as it’s happening. It’s not a perfect system, but it’s the best one we’ve got.
So what do we do if the referee misses a Tyler Bozak trip, or gives a major for a Cody Eakin shove that may not deserve it? How do we handle those situations?
The same way we did for the first 100 years of the NHL: We lived with it.
Oh, we complained. Fans booed. Players screamed. Coaches occasionally threw benches. We waved our glasses at the ref and told him he was missing a great game while the organist played “Three Blind Mice.”
And then life went on. Because it’s sports, and bad calls happen, and not everything bad that happens in life can be instantly fixed for us. Missed calls suck. Believe me, I know. If I thought that adding replay review for subjective penalties would fix all those controversies without creating 10 times as many new ones, I’d be all over it. But it won’t.
Subjective calls you disagree with will happen. We can live with them. It’s really our only option.
(Should we give the refs some extra help in the form of an “eye-in-the-sky” official who could also make calls? I have no idea. I’m not touching that proposal here, because it’s not really a replay question. If the referees think an extra voice in their head at all times would be helpful, then sure, let’s give it a try. I’m skeptical, but I’m not a ref, so we’ll leave it to them.)
Step 5: The only viable solution for offside review
OK, so we’ve covered penalties and various puck-related violations. What about offside review? How do we fix that?
Easy. We get rid of it. Completely.
It hasn’t worked. We tried it for four years, because we overreacted to Matt Duchene being offside by five feet on one play that most fans still don’t even understand. (The linesman didn’t miss Duchene being offside; he mistakenly thought the other team had controlled the puck back into its own zone.) We thought replay would be an easy way to fix those obvious misses. We were wrong.
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Instead, we’ve had four years of squinting at fuzzy freeze frames to see if a skate was in the wrong place by a fraction of an inch or, worse, ever so slightly in the air. We haven’t caught a single Duchene play in all that time, because they turn out to be extraordinarily rare. But we have taken hundreds of perfectly good goals off the board because of plays we never even noticed before.
Enough. There are probably ways to improve offside review, but we don’t need to put a fresh coat of paint on this junker. It hasn’t worked. Get rid of it.
Does that mean there will inevitably come a day when another Duchene play happens and we have no way to go back and fix it? Sure. With our luck, probably soon than later. Oh well. If the alternative is sitting through hundreds of pointless reviews, let’s take our chances that we can handle a bad miss once a decade or so without the world ending.
Bettman says the ship has sailed on getting rid of offside review. Nonsense. We’ve had it for less than four percent of the NHL’s history. We had the skate-in-crease rule longer than this, and we happily launched that one into the sun and then had a party afterward. Real leadership means admitting your mistakes and then fixing them. Offside review was a mistake. Dump it.
Step 6: The goalie interference conundrum
Hoo boy. This one gets tough.
On the one hand, we’ve said we don’t want review of anything subjective, and goalie interference is a completely subjective call. Actually, it’s worse than that – it’s a whole series of subjective calls that overlap on each other to add up to a final decision. It’s a mess. And it’s completely ill-suited to freeze frame reviews, as we’ve learned over the last four years. It’s awfully tempting to give this one the same treatment we just gave offside review.
But on the other hand, goals matter, and interference by definition happens immediately before or even concurrent with a goal being scored. Unlike just about everything else we’re talking about here, there’s no question over whether these calls affect a goal. It seems like we should have something in place here.
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I don’t know. So I’m going to punt just a little bit by saying that we keep interference reviews, but we take them out of the hands of coaches and leave them purely at the discretion of the league. That might mean the Toronto war room, or that off-ice official, or someone else – it doesn’t really matter. But somebody has the authority to buzz down to the ref and say “Hey, you’re going want to look at this.”
We’re going to be very clear that when these reviews happen, we’re only overturning plays where we’re close to 100 percent sure the original call was wrong. When in doubt, the call on the ice stands. It’s not a starting point or a suggestion. It’s the default setting, and we don’t change it unless the replay makes it clear that we have no choice.
Does that work? I’m not completely convinced that it does. But it’s better than any other option I can come up with.
Step 7: About those coach’s challenges
If you’ve been reading carefully, you may have noticed something: Our new plan hasn’t included any coach’s challenges. That’s because they’re gone.
Sorry guys. In theory, it was a good idea. In reality, we handed you some power over the game and you used it to bring us nitpicky challenges on plays nobody had ever had a problem with in the nearly 100-year history of the league. And not just the ones that you or your players could see in real time. You went and assigned people on your staff to stare at slow-motion screens and find those fractions of an inch as they happened.
We understand why you did that – in hindsight, it was the only reasonable thing for you to do. And you’d keep doing it if we let you, because of course you would.
So we won’t let you. We’ve re-calibrated our reviews to focus on plays that lead directly to goals, which means they can fall under the league’s automatic review protocol. We’ve turned interference over to the league too. And we’ve eliminated offside review entirely. And that means we don’t need challenges anymore. One less thing for you guys to worry about. No need to thanks us.
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And as an added bonus, this means you get your timeouts back. Remember timeouts? Those things you used to use for mid-game strategic adjustments or to rest players at critical moments, or just to stem the momentum when a game was slipping away from you? Today, you can’t do any of that, because you have to save that timeout in case you need it for a review. Now you’ll get them back, to use as you see fit.
Step 8: Ask our friends for a favor (that we won’t get)
As part of all this, we’re going to do a little behind-the-scenes lobbying. Specifically, we’re going to go to our multibillion-dollar TV partners with a simple request: Maybe don’t spend the first year of these new rules constantly trying to find any missed offside or other questionable call that we didn’t review and plaster it all over your broadcast.
I know it will be tempting. There’s going to be an adjustment period, and while that’s going on, fans will have an appetite for anything that would have been different under the old system. That’s especially true if it gives them a reason to complain about their team being robbed. There will be lots of room for complaining here, at least early on.
We’re going to hope our partners won’t do that to us. We’ll ask them not to. That’s all we’ll do is ask – we’re not forcing anything here, because mandatory rah-rah coverage doesn’t help anyone. If the broadcasts really want to spend their intermission segments with a panel of angry old guys yelling about a freeze-frame of a play that was maybe offside but can no longer be reviewed, let them. Some viewers will probably eat it up, at least at first.
The point is we know this stuff will be coming, and we’ll live with it. Meanwhile, fans will adjust. It was weird in 1999-2000 when you noticed guys with their skates in the crease on plays where goals still counted. We got used to it. It didn’t take as long as you might think it would.
Step 9: Be clear on the purpose of all of this
This one’s simple and we’ve already touched on it, but it’s important enough to warrant its own section.
Under my plan, the idea behind replay review is to catch obvious errors. We’re not trying to nitpick or find reasons to take goals off the board. We want to get the big misses right. That’s it. That’s the whole purpose.
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That means we’re going to rewrite all the various replay rules to make it crystal clear that calls will only be overturned if the video evidence is indisputable.
And we’ll make sure our referees know that. When in doubt, keep the call on the ice. If it’s hard to know for sure, based on a couple of the angles or that one screengrab somebody posted on Twitter, stick with your call and we’ll have your back. But if you change the right call to the wrong one based on replay, it’s a fireable offense. Do not overturn unless you’re sure.
Will that take some getting used to by fans? Sure. It’s not the way the NHL does it today, even though it’s how the current rules suggest they’re supposed to. But fans will learn. Especially because of our last step …
Step 10: Communication is key
We’ll end with what might be the most important step of all. Luckily for us, it’s also among the easiest.
Tell your fans what you’re doing, and why.
Not once. Not the first time. Not occasionally. Every time.
It doesn’t matter how smart your system is. It doesn’t matter if you’re getting it right. It doesn’t matter if all the GMs and coaches and players love it. If the fans don’t understand what you’re doing, you’ve failed. And right now, the NHL is failing. And they’re failing because they barely even seem to be trying.
Our new system will fail too, unless fans understand it. We’ll make sure they will.
That means that every review starts with a referee getting on his mic and explaining what’s being reviewed, and what the call on the ice was. And when the review is done, they explain what the ruling is and why.
Yes, I know these guys hate this part. I know every NHL referee other than Wes McCauley looks like they want to swallow their own tongue every time they have to talk to the crowd. Too bad. This is important. Take a public speaking course if you need to. This is part of your job description now.
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No more telling us “After review we have a good goal” and then skating away to murmurs of confusion. Why is it a good goal? What were you even looking for? What did you see?
The NFL isn’t a bad model to follow here. They’re not perfect, but at least the referees make an effort to explain what they’re looking at. The NHL can do at least as well.
And it won’t stop with the referees. Have you ever seen those little dispatches the league posts to its website after every review? If not, don’t worry, because they’re completely useless. They all basically say the same thing: There was a review, we did the review, and the result was goal/no-goal. No reasoning. No explanation. No point.
Again, there’s a model to follow here, and for once it’s actually the NHL itself. You don’t have to like the Department of Player Safety decisions, but those videos they make to explain them are really good. They’ll even occasionally get you to change your mind about something. And even if they don’t, they at least let you know what they were thinking. You don’t need a full five-minute video for every replay review, but the same sort of philosophy needs to apply.
And what if there’s an especially controversial call? There shouldn’t be, remember, because we’re only overturning obvious stuff, but maybe we screw up and it happens anyway. If so, we need a league official to be front and center with an explanation. Stephen Walkom giving quotes to a pool reporter is a decent start, but we need more than that. Bryan Lewis used to go on Hockey Night in Canada to explain controversial calls – here he is in the moments after the Brett Hull debacle. Whether you accept his explanation or not, at least he’s offering one on behalf of the league. Let’s get back to that.
So there you have it. We’ve expanded replay review to more areas than it covers today, including some penalties. But we’ve also made sure there will be fewer reviews overall, because we’ve eliminated the most common one. We’ve redefined expectations, dumped the coach’s challenge, and promised to do a better job of telling our fans what’s going on. And we’ll never have to watch a pixelated skate hover over a fuzzy blueline ever again.
Is that better than what we have now? I think it definitely is. Is it better than whatever Bettman offers today? We’ll see. Is it the best we could possibly do? You tell me. I’m open to other ideas here, because like I keep saying, this is a hard question that goes way beyond “just get it right.”
But now you know how I’ll do it when I’m named commissioner. (Just try to act surprised when it happens.)
(Photo: Dave Sandford / Getty Images)
